Our Opinion: Gamesmanship

Bills would hurt high-school sports

Under the Florida High School Athletic Association - which is to Florida's schools what the NCAA is to college athletics - teams compete for championships in about 30 sports. Florida athletes are prized throughout the country. And those athletes compete on a level playing field, thanks to the oversight and enforcement of the FHSAA.

Is there a problem here that needs to be fixed?

Apparently, because the Legislature is back with a bill similar to one that stalled in the Senate last year. Under the guise of protecting the rights of student-athletes, the Legislature would clamp down on the FHSAA and make it much more difficult to stop the handful of schools that cheat.

House Bill 1279 (which passed out of the Choice & Innovation Subcommittee on Wednesday and now is in the Education Appropriations Subcommittee) and the similar Senate Bill 1164 would punish the FHSAA with new requirements for reports and audits, new terms of office for the board of directors and even restrictions on the travel expenses of the executive director.

It also includes a death penalty, borrowing language from last year's effort: "If the FHSAA fails to meet the provisions of this section, the commissioner shall designate a nonprofit organization to govern athletics with the approval of the State Board of Education."

But the most contentious provisions of the bill are the ones "providing procedures for student residence and transfer approvals" and "providing that the burden is on the FHSAA to demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that a student is ineligible to participate in a high-school athletic competition."

Translation: When an unscrupulous coach illegally recruits a star athlete, the FHSAA will be hamstrung in its efforts to stop it.

Larry Metz, R-Eustis, who is the sponsor of the House bill, says, "We have a lot of students and parents who are not well-positioned to challenge an organization with the resources and institutional knowledge of an FHSAA-level organization, and so it's sort of a little guy against the big guy."

The FHSAA sees it differently, saying in a statement: "This policy change would jeopardize the integrity of high-school athletic competition by creating the equivalent of 'free agency' for student-athletes."

For 93 years, the FHSAA has done a good job in keeping high-school sports fair and fun.

To repeat what we said last year: These bills are overkill; legislators should recognize them as such and bench them for good.